Hi everyone,

We're proud to announce the release of Castle Game Engine 5.0.0 :) Castle Game Engine is an open-source (LGPL) 3D and 2D game engine, of course for modern Object Pascal (FreePascal / Lazarus). We support many 3D formats and various graphic effects. The main engine site, with detailed list of features, links to downloads and documentation, is on

http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/engine.php

The main feature of 5.0.0 release is the support for Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad) platforms. We use OpenGLES 2.0 renderer underneath, and our engine can render on Android/iOS almost the same things as on normal desktop systems :) Thousand thanks go the FPC team for making it all possible.

Other new engine features include nice 2D API (although the engine started as a 3D engine, it's very comfortable now to make pure 2D games too) and new font reading and rendering (using FreeType).

Check out also "Darkest Before the Dawn"
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/darkest_before_dawn.php , our first game done for Android :)

The details about new engine features are on
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/news.php?id=2014-05-01 .

There is also a wiki page documenting Android specifics: https://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/wiki/Android%20development/ and iOS specifics:
http://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/wiki/iOS%20Development/ .

Engine usage tutorial is on
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/tutorial_intro.php and API reference is on
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/apidoc/html/index.html .

Have fun!
Michalis

Hi,

I am evaluating your engine for a little project.
First I have looked everywhere but not found how physics are handled. It does not look like there is an integrated engine but I have not found any documentation on how and which external engines can be used either. Can you tell me where to find the information? Second I am not sure that I understood correctly what kind of animations are supported. If I export my animations from blender, can I export the armature (bones) and get access to them in your engine or is it only key frame animation. Key frame animations would not be enough for me since at least some animations need to be physics based and not predefined.

Thanks
R.

I wonder whether I could ask one very basic question. Is this intended for creating e.g VRML that can then be used with other viewers, or is the intention simply to use VRML as an intermediate format to describe scenes and objects which then are animated using Castle and rendered to a local display via a high-bandwidth API such as OpenGL?

Leading on from that, can Castle interwork with formats handled by Second Life and related projects? What are its selling points when compared with OpenSimulator, Open Cobalt and so on?

We do not integrate yet with any physics engine. I know it's important (and fun!), and it is planned for the near future (for 5.1.0 or 5.2.0) release. See also
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/forum.php#section_developers . Right now, we have our own collision detection and gravity, but without any real physics fun.

Contributions are very, very welcome here of course :) You could also implement physics integration on top of the engine, in principle you don't need to modify the engine, just animate the transformation hierarchy. (Although in practice integrating physics more tightly with the engine will surely be nice.)

We support various animations in VRML/X3D using interpolators, we also support H-Anim skeletal and skinned animation (
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/x3d_implementation_hanim.php ).

However, current exporter from Blender->X3D does not export Blender animations in any way to X3D... As a solution, for now, you can export Blender animations to KAnim (
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/blender.php ), which is really just a sequence of 3D models that is intelligently merged by engine when loading. IOW, that is a short-coming of the current Blender X3D exporter (which I hope will be fixed one day, maybe even by me :)).

So, if you wonder about using the existing Blender->X3D exporter: it currently just does not export animations. If you think about writing your own Blender->X3D exporter (or improving the existing one), then you could export the animation from Blender however you like to standard X3D and the engine will take them :)

However, like said above: the integration with physics engine is not done yet, so you will not get physics-based animation (like rigid bodies) anyway. For now!

Regards,
Michalis

Both. We have both reading and writing of VRML and X3D covered. You can use the engine to load/construct/modify the VRML/X3D node graph, then you can render it and/or you can save it back to a VRML/X3D file. As long as you don't use any of our VRML/X3D extensions nodes ( http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/x3d_extensions.php ), the resulting VRML/X3D files will be perfectly readable by any VRML/X3D browser.

Basically, Castle Game Engine is a game engine, that can load/save X3D (and other 3D model formats), and render X3D (with many eye-candy effects). And also we have stuff for 2D, for scene manager, for AI in games etc... But we do not include anything "instant" for creating multi-user worlds. Of course you could use Castle Game Engine as a basis for this, to implement a standalone (and Android, and iOS, and in the future browser plugin) client for such system. But implementing the networking part will be on your side.

Regards,
Michalis

Contributions are very, very welcome here of course :)

Thought so, but I am looking for a solution not for more work. :)

In short I am looking for an engine with real time skinning support as I need the animations to be created in real time based on physics (think ragdoll but a little different). That's something a sequence of 3D models cannot provide.

Thanks for the answers but looks like I have to look somewhere else.

R.